


demiurge

by nestorius (orphan_account)



Category: Mindhunter (TV 2017)
Genre: F/F, Lesbian Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-01
Updated: 2017-12-01
Packaged: 2019-02-09 00:26:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12876267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/nestorius
Summary: Wendy considers past and present.





	demiurge

 Another file on her desk. She looked at it and a snake coiled around her esophagus. She pushed it away with a pencil. The folder flopped open. She needn’t have bothered, really. They were all the same. Their excuses. All the same. Why’d you kill those girls? Well, Mister FBI, it’s because I wanted to fuck them.

Wendy flicked through the transcript. Half-smiled, despite herself. Holden hadn’t said _cunt_ this time. Oh, how her standards had risen.

She closed the folder. She rose to put it in the cabinet. Her feet hurt and she with sudden and nauseous anger hated Jerry Brudos: she would like to place a knife in his belly and tear up, up. Not because he killed but because he was stupid. Why in God’s name would you want to wear these fucking things?

“You need some rest,” she said aloud.

She did: she’d been working late, this week. Holden had been otherwise occupied. She had to pick up his slack. They had not yet determined if Holden’s transgressions would go on his permanent record or if there would be no permanent record because Holden would never work for the Federal Bureau of Investigations ever again. He showed up but they’d leashed them both. Three-hour drive radius. No planes. He had, apparently, abused a travel stipend. Bill was furious with him. He didn’t need to be: Holden hung to the agency by a thread, and that was clearly scarier than any wrath Agent Tench could muster. Wendy had expected him to sulk but he was quiet, and twitched at loud noises. Sometimes he was red-eyed when he came in.  
She should have been relieved that he didn’t sulk.

She should have felt a little apologetic. If one is not given permission to diagnose, one should not, even if it’s just in one’s head, a reflex borne of hours highlighting other diagnoses. One should consider other circumstances.

Wendy still looked at him and thought, _you are enjoying this._

She passed him on the way out: he had a pencil in his mouth, sucking. She’d seen a bottle of Xanax in his desk a week ago. She wondered who was prescribing. If anyone was.

She kicked off her shoes in the car and drove home barefoot.

 

 

 

 

 

Boston marriage, Annaliese said.

Annaliese was older and prim. She didn’t say _cunt._ She described their affair. Daughters of Bilitis, sisters of Sappho, all these wonderful high terms. She and Wendy had discussed the problem of invisibility and desire. Wendy had not read The Well of Loneliness so Annaliese insisted. Annaliese liked inveighing their actions with a history spanning back thousands of years. She enjoyed being weighted to a before. Wendy appreciated the enjoyment, but she herself looked forward, to the horizon.

Wendy lay on the couch. She’d taken her skirt off. Her pantyhose had a run in it. She had rolled it down to her knees.

A Friday night.

A Friday night in Boston: Annaliese on the couch. Annaliese no longer had to do anything as lowly as grading. She read prodigiously, as was to be expected. She had a martini. And Wendy would come in the door and slip off her shoes and depart to the bedroom, unacknowledged, to take off her jacket, to unsnap her bra. She’d pad barefoot back to the living room and sit, and there would be a second martini for her, and the book tented, and Annaliese’s arm around her shoulders.

A Friday night in Quantico: the couch.

She didn’t miss Annaliese exactly. She missed the shape of Annaliese. Not her body but the space she filled. Her books, her art collection, her wine glasses. Wendy had over the preceding five years felt no desire to personalize their spaces. It felt as if she and Annaliese had become the same creature, an ivory-covered beskirted blob of snobbery, and thus neither of them had the need to distinguish themselves from each other.

Gore and William bickered, at least. They’d mastered the art of sounding like they hated each other. She’d attended their partnership ceremony and Gore had said “Hell will be livelier with you, my dear,” and William nearly lunged at him laughing. Fifteen of them, all hell-bound, in Gore’s living room, drinking wine. Their hands crawled all over each other. Gore’s primness never extended to his special guests. Let Hannah sit in Lily’s lap; let Franklin hold his conversation as he rubbed Stefan’s back. Let there be casual cheek-kisses and hands held. To touch. To touch, and for there to be people around to witness it. A revelation. Worth William’s reactionary droning.

She’d worn heels to the partnership ceremony.

Wendy thought about Annaliese naked and stabbed a finger in her cunt. She was bored enough that she didn’t even try feeling around. Annaliese had a certain way of holding her thumb down on Wendy that pinned her to the spot, like a butterfly under glass. They were not amorphous in bed. Annaliese split them down the seam. She kept the lights on. She had come to her realizations two decades before Wendy had, and she took safety measures. They had a large heavy mirror on the wall opposite the bed and Wendy could watch herself. Wendy slung over the footboard, her legs spread for Annaliese’s ministrations, clawing at the wood. Annaliese kept a silk tie in her underwear drawer. It tasted of cedar and the lavender sachet.

Wendy withdrew her finger and licked it. Dry as a bone down there.

Annaliese had been old enough to be her mother.

As an invert, she should have had an absent mother and a too-present overbearing father, but her daddy could not be considered overbearing. He’d ruffled her hair on the way out the door and maybe read her a bedtime story. He’d say “Good job” when she brought home straight As. He’d never had much cause to be angry with her.  
Her daddy had come home from the war. He drank. It wasn’t Daddy drank kind of drank. He drank with his buddies and he had an extra glass of whiskey here and there. There were extremes of sadness and happiness and anger, but at reasonable intervals, with reasonable triggers. He’d never hurt her.

She must be replacing the absent mother with Annaliese, but that wasn’t right either. Her momma taught her needlepoint. She sat at the library desk next to Momma, stitching her letters to learn them, and when she had a full pile of samplers Momma let her pick out the books. The Monroe County Library had not had a copy of The Well of Loneliness. Momma wouldn’t have minded if they had. Momma said _, People burn books. And you know, I say to them, every time you see a book, you look at the pages and you count all the letters, every single last one. And you think of all those thousands and millions of letters counted and every single one, why, that’s a person hasn’t had his mind changed by a book. So if you burn a book you’re setting fire to a thousand minds._ She let Wendy read anything she could find.

Daddy lived in Honeoye Falls. Moved out there, out of the city, to his parents’ old farm, after Momma had gone to her rest. An outsider might think that relevant but Wendy had been fucking other women way before the cancer showed up.

Wendy sat up. She bounced on the couch a little, and then she stood up. She went to the bedroom.

Wendy owned one single pair of jeans. She had purchased them in 1968 and they had spent the greater part of the decade hanging up in a series of closets. She’d been rounder in 1968. She had to notch her belt tight. She looked at herself in the mirror and supposed the shirt worked with it. She had heelless cowboy boots in the closet, bought on a whim at a flea market. She didn’t wear them much. The first time she’d brought them home and walked around in them she’d felt an odd press at the side that she hadn’t noticed trying them on. She’d excavated and found a pocket. The pocket had a slim knife in it that, if taped flat, did not bother her. She taped it flat.

She toyed with her hair. Up, down. Didn’t matter, it was too short to make her look much younger. She took her makeup off, unhooked her earrings. She examined herself. Nothing about her said DYKE at first glance but she had not yet found the bar around Quantico where saying that would be safe. She did not look old and she did not look sloppy but no makeup would perhaps tell men to kindly look elsewhere. The nice blouse atop the too-big comfortable jeans implied that she was tired and would prefer to be left alone. The knife would serve if blouse and bare face did not.

She didn’t know what she was doing but she missed Annaliese, very suddenly, not just on the shape. She dug her fingers into her palms.

If Edmund Kemper had done what he did before the age of twenty-six on account that he could not have sex with women, then surely she could –

She grit her teeth. She placed the back of her hand on her mouth. Don’t carry work home. Never carry work home. One of Annaliese’s rules, and not a bad one.

And, for the love of God, don’t act like Holden.

Her new rule.

She added a bolo tie to the shirt before leaving.

 

 

 

 

 

The bar was near the university, and noisy. Wendy ordered a gin and tonic. Single women, very young, dolled up to various degrees. Early enough in the night that they clustered together. University students. Wendy scanned. A smallish girl in the huddle, short-clipped hair. Her shirt clung to her chest but it had been buttoned up to the neck and it was plaid. She wore men’s jeans. They didn’t fit in the way they were supposed to fit when you wore men’s jeans. She kept glancing over her shoulder, and when she did her earrings flashed. Poor little girl. New to this, huh? Wendy accepted her drink from the bartender, sipped slow. Wendy could wait her out.

“Hi,” someone said, startling her.

Wendy swiveled. Down the bar, in the shadows, Holden’s girlfriend. Fuck. Wendy clenched and faked up a smile. “Hello."

“Hi,” the girl said again. She had a beer. Half empty. She rolled her chin into her hands. “I didn’t take you for a, for a this-kind-of-place kind-of-person.”

“We all need a little fun on Fridays,” Wendy said. “Is Holden here?”

The girl snorted and pressed her hand to her forehead. She had a long neck. Elegant. Swanlike. “No.”

“Meeting you later?”

“I don’t give a fuck where he is,” the girl said. “I truly do not. You know where he is? In front of a mirror, insisting to himself he can suck his own cock.”

Wendy said nothing.

The girl rubbed her eyes and shook her head. “Shouldn’t have said that.”

“So,” Wendy said, “he is scared of smart women.”

“Oh no,” the girl said. “He’s just a fucking lunatic.”

She downed her beer.

Wendy took her gin and tonic in hand. She moved the three seats down. The girl had red-rimmed eyes. Her hands trembled. Debbie, that was her name. She’d sit here all night and drown herself, Wendy could tell. Slept-in, ruffled shirt, under a limp cardigan. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

“I’m sorry,” Wendy said. “That it didn’t work out.”

“I’m sorry I wasted so much time. I’m sorry I believed – I’m sorry.” Debbie swiped at her eyes. “It’s been two weeks. I thought I was fine, I wanted it, but it – ”

“It hit,” Wendy offered.

Debbie sighed. She drank. She did not drain it.

“Yes,” she said, softly. “It hit.”

“We all have the right to be emotional.”

“It’s not just that. Fuck.” Debbie dug the heel of her hand into her eyes. “You study – studied, sorry. How’d you put it. Business titans.”

Wendy made a noncommittal sound.

Debbie smiled. “Holden would have done well in business. Wouldn’t he.”

Wendy looked at her and for the first time she saw fear, and she was very glad that Holden was quiet and jumpy behind his desk.

She said, “I’ll buy you a drink.”

“Holden bought me a drink here. Once.” Debbie flicked at her glass. “I thought he was sweet.”

“Why did you think that?”

“I don’t know,” Debbie said. She was exasperated. She flicked harder. “He has a cute face. He had on this secondhand suit. He wore it to work the next day. I thought – I don’t know.”

She drummed her fingers on the bartop.

“He was sweet,” she said softly.

“He’s very versatile in how he presents himself,” Wendy said, which was true enough. "I suppose it helps in his work.”

“It helps him lie.”

Wendy looked at her.

She knew, intimately, that women overflowed. Men could shout and break glasses. Women had to stop the river however they could. Women had to dam it. Cigarettes. Valium. Fucking the postman. Debbie bled at the edges. It came out of her eyes. She kept blinking rapidly. Kept flicking her glass.

“Let me buy you a drink,” Wendy said again.

Debbie laughed, a harsh birdcry of a sound, and dug her nails into her wrist. “I don’t want anyone to buy me a drink.”

“Why not?”

“Holden bought me a drink.”

“I’m not Holden.”

“You work with him.”

“When I go out on a Friday night,” Wendy said, “I don’t wear a suit.”

Debbie dug. She drew in a deep breath through her nose.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and then she started crying. A light spring rain sort of cry, the tears snaking in tracks down her cheeks. She patted her eyes, blinked, blinked. “I’m so sorry. I’m not like this, usually.”  
Wendy patted in her bag for a tissue. Debbie took it and looked at it and she sobbed, once and deep, and then she sobbed again, and then she planted her elbows on the bartop and her face in her palms and heaved.

And then, just as Wendy put an arm on her back, she sat up. She cleaned her face with the tissue. She was businesslike about it, like scrubbing a whining child with a rough dishcloth. She undid the tie holding her hair in a bun and it cascaded down her shoulders. Sitting up really showed that she wasn’t wearing a bra. Gray cardigan over her loose paisley shirt. The collar, once straightened, dipped down her chest.

Wendy’s tongue crept into the side of her mouth. She shook her head, coughed. “Did you walk here?”

“Yeah. Why the hell not. It’s early.”

“Would you like a ride home?”

Debbie looked at her. “That’s kind of you,” she said. Her voice had flattened down into stone and gray. “But I wouldn’t want to run your night.”

“You wouldn’t be ruining it.”

“You haven’t finished your drink.”

“It’s a G&T at a college bar,” Wendy said. “It was a dollar and it tastes like it. I can mix another one at home.”

Debbie shook her head. She sat up rail straight. She was quite thin.

“I need to get drunk,” she said.

“Then I’ll buy you a drink.”

“I don’t want you to buy me a drink. Why are you buying me a drink? Holden bought me a drink. _A_ drink. _Once._ My God.”

Debbie made a sound that could have been the same species of laughter if you squinted. Like how elephants’ closest relatives were small rat-like creatures.  
“My God,” she repeated. “I paid for everything, didn’t I.”

“I’ll buy you two drinks, then,” Wendy said.

Debbie had cat eyes. She scratched at her lip. Dry lips, Wendy could see, even in the dark of the bar. Been biting them.

Wendy put her gin and tonic on the bar and stood up. She pushed the stool in and walked back. One step, two. Debbie sagged, and then she stood as well.

Debbie lit a cigarette. It was indeed early, not much past sunset. Those dolled-up girls at the bar, they’d have a long time to wait. Wendy put that in her pocket for next time. The girl in the man’s jeans, the man’s jeans that didn’t fit, she’d wait. She would know patience. Wendy knew. Wendy had waited.

“I want to go home,” Debbie said. She had pulled off her cardigan and tied it around her waist. She smoked quickly, in tight drags, ash dropping on her fingers and shirt. She rubbed at the ash and succeeded in smearing a gray line. It bisected her, across her breasts. She made a small moan of distaste and inhaled deep. “I feel like such a baby.”

“Why?”

“I walked here. I thought it would calm me down. And now I don’t want to walk back.”

“It’s getting dark,” Wendy said. “Not wanting to walk back isn’t laziness.”

“I want it to be.”

Her bitterness lit up the dusk.

Wendy watched her rub at her chest. She didn’t see such things too often. She inhaled, brief, through her nose, and said, “I could drive – I could. You could walk, and I could drive alongside – ”

That sounded ridiculous, and it was, but Debbie turned to her, and the cigarette’s fire bloomed in her eyes. She sucked her lip in her mouth and bit down, too hard, and when she pouched her mouth out again she had little rabbit-teethmarks

“I’d like that,” she said, very soft.

Wendy’s chest hurt. She called it sympathy and patted Debbie’s hand. She pointed across the lot. “Where do you live?”

Debbie jogged to keep up with the car, and Wendy slowed to keep up with her. They figured out a pattern two minutes in. Debbie came to walk in the street, just at the curb, one hand on the car like it was a horse that had pulled her out of a swamp. Empty streets. Too early for parties. No moon yet. No sun. A fuzzy darkness of the human spirit, or something. Wendy thought of the balcony at Gore and William’s country house. A blazing white moon. A freckling of stars. A hand inside her. The decorations on the railing slick with sweat. Breasts pressing against her back. She didn’t scold herself for thoughts. She would think them and no one would know.

She parked.

Debbie’s hands shook putting the key in the lock. The apartment smelled of old marijuana and unwashed sheets. Wine glasses on every surface. Debbie shucked off her shoes and Wendy followed her in.

Debbie came to the center of the bedroom and pivoted. Ballerina pivot. Fifteen years old, perhaps, but too perfect not to be.

She said, her voice too high pitched to avoid a wince, “Can I offer you a drink?”

“We just left the bar,” Wendy said, kindly. “Why don’t you sit down?”

Debbie hugged her elbows. The lights in here dim enough to have pretty names: amber, gold, bronze. A skirt on the floor. A typewriter in the corner. Debbie did not sit down but kneaded her arms and tilted her head back and blew out her lips. A stray strand of hair fluttered past her ear. The cardigan loosened and fell to the floor.

“I’m sorry,” she said. It was a weak and sticky sound and Wendy felt terrible about it. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to be like this.”

“Please don’t apologize to me, Debbie.” Wendy folded her hands at her front. “Should I go?”

Debbie didn’t shake her head but she didn’t say yes either. She rubbed at her chest, absently: she rubbed at her face.

“Don’t do that.”

Debbie shot up, eyes glittering.

“You have ash,” Wendy said. “On.”

She would have sighed at herself for not finishing the sentence. And then Debbie took her shirt off. She had small perfect breasts and she hadn’t been eating enough. She said, “Oh,” like she hadn’t realized that you shouldn’t take your clothes off in front of your ex-boyfriend’s staid coworker, and she clasped her arms atop her breasts like chains, and her entire body turned to ice. She was paralyzed with embarrassment and Wendy could see, in some odd way, that it was not for this, that it had to do with the rest of the world.

Wendy moved slow, like trying not to startle a cat. Poor girl. She knelt to pick up the shirt.

Debbie drew in a hissing breath between her teeth. Wendy didn’t understand why first and then she understood. Kneel, shirt. Wendy was pleased but reticent. She had made a similar sound, once, and then it had been months before she followed it up.

Debbie folded back onto the bed.

Wendy inched forward on her knees. Slender leg against her side. Her jeans were well-worn, unlike Wendy’s. The button popped. She half-rolled away when Wendy tried to assist so Wendy pushed down on her knuckles and listened to her blood sing.

Hunger, she always hated that, she didn’t know why but she hated it. To eat. A person could make the argument that the food nourished them, but what respect did you have for your food? Wendy had picked off rabbits from the vegetable garden with the help of her father’s hand on her shoulder, and she’d pulled blueberries from the bushes out at Annaliese’s family property out on the Cape, and she had crushed them in her mouth and blotted at the juice or the blood and not thought anything of it. Hunger, that wasn’t a word for the body of a fair and fine woman presented in front of another woman of her tenor. Hunger struck animalistic and whatever Annaliese had not provided she had at least had Wendy learn that lesson by heart. Not beneath but above. The weight of the past, sinking past prayers, past Sappho, to a dark lit only by moon, to a welcoming dark, unthronged by monsters. Grassland and steppe. Mammoth-tusk temples, Willendorf Venuses, sabre-tooth tiger, apex, moon. Ridiculous.

She licked through Debbie’s panties.

Every vulva a labyrinth of its own particular making. Annaliese had exacting rules for general skill and even more exacting rules for particular. Enforced. Regularly tested.

She hated hunger and she knew why, it brought up work, it brought up her inversion, it said they were one and the same. She was not hungry. She lacked a church.

Debbie did not pull her panties off – she ripped them, and she sat up enough to grind down. Breathless nights. Wendy dared two fingers, stroke her lips apart, test the waters, so to speak. Hand in her hair. Tug. “Ah,” Wendy said, and the tug went yank, and it was good. Debbie had long inner lips and she twitched bodily when Wendy sucked on one and Wendy had a wonderfully smug idea about Holden’s treatment of the labyrinth. Inside a monster but not a monster, an idea of rage. She licked Debbie til Debbie groaned and sat up straight and backed up against the bed, and Wendy lay back on the mattress and waited for her to adjust. Debbie pinched her nipple and she left ash on her breast. She had a streak of ash on her face. Wendy locked her hands behind Debbie’s back and concentrated on what little breath she could find. Inhaled her. Overslept in a bed two days unmade. Drowned it in perfume and weed. Nothing delicious and better for that. Real. Not fantasy. Her jaw ached and her neck and shoulders would ache and Debbie made a long drawnout sound, indescribable, and that buried deep in Wendy’s chest. She imagined her mouth on Debbie’s nipple. Debbie and  her gray warpaint.

She was sure Debbie was past three before Debbie leaned forward on her knees and rolled away. She lay there as if unconscious. Wendy knew that look. She considered in mild numb terror the implications. She stood.

Debbie shot out. Grabbed her wrist.

The breath between them caught in a dark thicket.

Wendy unbuttoned her blouse, one-handed. She unbuttoned her jeans. Debbie let her undress and then iron-gripped her wrist again. Handcuffs, Wendy thought, and lockpicks. She took off her boots and lay down. Debbie was red all over.

“He came to pick his things up on his lunch break,” she said. “He’d come from the office, he was – he had a box, from the office, of – he was putting things in the box and the box broke. He asked me for tape. I gave him tape. I went into the next room and I shut – I shut the door.”

“He left a picture on the floor.”

“From work.”

“Yes.”

“How bad?”

“I don’t want to talk about Holden,” Debbie said. “She had been stabbed sixteen times.”

“That’s why it hit.”

Debbie rolled over and her eyes were narrow.

“He would not do anything more than that,” she said.

Wendy considered.

“No,” she said. “He wouldn’t.”

“He’s a coward. Besides it’s not fun. Am I a lesbian now?”

“That’s up to you.”

Debbie rolled onto her back. She adjusted her arms, flat by her side. She straightened her legs and held them together, pressed her heels down. She looked up, straight ahead, unblinking. Stiff, Wendy thought. She thought about little deaths and corpses. She gave up. No way not to think about it.

“He picked takeout,” Debbie said. “We never talked about it. I said a few times, oh, can’t we get something other than Chinese. It bothered me. I don’t think I ever liked him.”

“You’re young,” Wendy said. “You have time.”

“How old are you?”

Wendy looked at the ceiling. 

“Twenty years younger than my last girlfriend,” she said.

Debbie bit her, softly. Her hands trembled on Wendy’s body. Wendy said, “Come on, you’re young, you can do harder than that,” and Debbie laughed but small, and her hands found Wendy’s throat.

Wendy lay there, after, long after Debbie had fallen asleep. She wondered if Debbie might kill her. She wondered if Debbie might kill Holden. She wasn’t blind: she could see Holden’s body underneath his ill-fitting shirts and arrogance. A body to keep, though the inside of the head rotted black. She wondered if Debbie could fit a hand in her. If they could host a living room full of like-minded individuals. If this would be like the interim between Georgette and Annaliese, the hotel rooms, the working girls, the silent nods exchanged with the chemistry professor she had no reason to talk to. She could find the girl in the men’s jeans that didn’t fit how they should. She’d find others. It would be fine.

Debbie rolled over, the first time she’d moved in her sleep. The pillow came with her. She slept with a knife under her pillow. It wasn’t a butcher’s knife, taken from the kitchen, hidden at a moment’s notice. Skinning knife.

Wendy thought about the both of them skinning Holden. Not because he was Holden but because he was there. Annaliese had had similar unrealized fantasies, which she attributed to rage at the unfairness of the world. Especially to them. She admitted her reasoning barely transcended Joseph Campbell but cited several stories to prove that only the most incredible of the gods could transcend the need for the opposite sex. Wendy didn’t disagree on either point. She had, occasionally, expanded.

She wore cowboy boots to work the next day.


End file.
